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Jim Greyson took one last drag of his cigarette, the smoke from his exhale rising in the air while he pressed the lit end into the ashtray on his desk. The nicotine helped to further relax his mind as it filled his very essence. Too much stress from the job tended to push one into bad, old habits.

He leaned back in his old leather chair as he lifted his whiskey glass to his lips, the ice cubes clinking in the glass.

The liquid burned going down his throat but god did he need it. It helped to take the edge off of his nerves.

Drinking on the job was against protocol. He didn't care, of course. Being the big boss had its perks. One of them being he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. There would be a warning, but it would be just for the paperwork.

His importance to the company superseded everything else.

It was him who had come up with their most recent venture. It was him who had organized the collecting of the assets. It was him who had done all of the dirty work to ensure success.

Pretty soon, whenever the team came back, he would have a new asset.

If they found them quick enough.

Before he could take another shot of whiskey, there was a knock at his office door. The short quick raps made him sigh, his shoulders sagging more than they already were.

Now was not a good time.

"Come in..." He replied, muttering expletives under his breath.

The door swung open to reveal the one person he didn't want to see right now. He narrowed his eyes slightly while he busied himself topping off his glass with more whiskey. It was something he could focus on other than the tall slender annoyance. Said annoyance set herself in one of the chairs opposite of him, her long elegant legs crossing over one another as she tossed a Manila folder onto his desk.

Piercing hazel eyes glared at him in silence.

"What is it, Alyson?" Jim poured her a glass of his fine "medicine" and set it before her.

A perfectly manicured hand accepted the drink and raised it to her lips, "Something happened at the lab in Mexico. You should see what's in that file, Jim."

"What's in it? Wait. Don't tell me! It's..." he waved a hand in the air, "another report on some new find the nerds discovered."

He looked up into the eyes of Director Alyson Anders. A tall slender blonde with a sharp angled bob and dressed in a white designer suit sat across him, her oval face wrinkled by a scowl.

She needed to smile more. Maybe then he would find her attractive. It was that horrible scowl she constantly wore that pushed him and others away, her very soul akin to a cactus, all prickly and hardened on the exterior.

Per usual, she had a designer bag in her lap, a small peach colored Hermès Birkin. He knew those things cost at least four grand a pop. His ex-wife liked to spend all his money on those damn things. Collecting them like Baseball cards. She had amassed one in almost every color and design. It was one of the reasons why he was now happily a single man.

Being in his fifties now, he figured he was too old to jump back in the dating scene.

He was too busy anyways. It's not like there were many women who wanted to be a spacer, either. His job sometimes required him to go off planet.

He didn't need a new anchor.

Alyson's lips curved in a half smile as she folded her arms, "No. it's better."

Huffing to himself after another draft of whiskey, he flipped open the file and glanced through the contents. Quickly he found that it was no average report from the nerds after all, but something far more unexpected.

His fist hit the desk so hard he knocked over a cup of pens, the writing instruments scattering across the wooden surface.

"Fuck! How come no one told me? This shit is...I...what the fuck, Anders?"

"I told you it was something you should see, Jim! You never listen!"

Narrowing his eyes at her, he took a big gulp of whiskey to quell the rising anger swelling in his breast. What he saw in the file was the last thing he wanted to see. Towards the back he found photographs taken from security cameras, all crystal clear and in color thanks to his insistence that they install high quality shit in every facility. He saw in full clarity of what transpired.

"So, they let the Predator escape, take the assets with it, and blow everything sky high?" Those incompetent bastards were lucky they were dead, no survivors reported in the entire file.

All of them.

Dead.

All that was left was a massive crater where the Mexican research lab had formerly been. The land around it was decimated as well.

Fucking aliens! He wanted to find and dissect every last one of them so he could personally sucker punch the ugly fucks. That crab faced bastard had blow billions of dollars up. The loss of this wasn't really a dent in the company's bank, but it would sure he felt in their paychecks come next week.

"No. One of the idiot new hires turned his back on the Predator and the blood bath began, at least according to the footage that we obtained. Thank god for the automatic back up to the main servers or we would've had no idea what happened. Shit's crazy at HQ. The shareholders aren't happy. We also are saying goodbye the the yearly bonus, according to Richard in Finance." Alyson took a long draft of her own whiskey, tapping her red nails against the glass as she held it close for another drink.

While he said there processing the news, he noticed how tired she looked. The makeup she wore did little to hide the bags under her eyes or the new lines that had appeared around her mouth.

When Alyson was losing sleep he knew shit wasn't good.

Again he perused through the file, examining the stills of the Predator slaughtering everyone around it, seeing the carrier of the asset running through the halls at various spots, and then of her entering the craft of the alien. The last one taken was showed the ship rising into the air in the hangar it had been stored in.

"We should move forward with the backup plan. I already have a team out searching for the next target. It has been difficult tracking her down since she's constantly on the move."

"It's getting close to that time spacers have to renew their access codes. Maybe...track her that way?" Alyson tilted her head to the side and met Jim's grey eyes.

He hadn't considered that, though he wouldn't put it off the table that his screw already was on it.

Spacers were required to have access codes for the dropholes that they traveled long distance by. Dropholes were stations where a ship could access FTL, or Faster Than Light travel. The technology was still being improved, so it was a somewhat dangerous endeavor. Those who chose to live and travel in space had to yearly renew their codes — these said codes allowing them to utilize the dropholes. They were essentially super advanced toll booths in space.

Someone had to pay for the upkeep and upgrades.

"Hm. I'm taking a guess to say that Stanton has beat us to the punch in that regard. He's very thorough when hunting bounties." He tapped at his computer keyboard and quickly brought up the data on the target.

He had never met her, but he sure knew her past. It wasn't pretty and full of loss.

"According to the latest report..." Jim scrolled down the page at the last communication with Kade Stanton, the leader of the group sent to find their next subject, the green digital font blurring together as he skim read. "Ah, they got a beat on her latest location thanks to the access code renewal, just as you suggested."

Alyson Anders rolled her eyes, "He's always ahead of us."

"Just another nerd at the end of the day, I say."

Kade Stanton was the prodigal son to the shareholders when it came to tracking down the sort of people that fit their criteria. The man was ruthless and efficient. He never lost his prey.

Alyson rose to her feet and slid the empty glass across the desk. Her eyes darkened slightly before she abruptly marched to the door, turning her head right as it opened.

"When they find her, tell me. I don't want anymore fuck ups." She hissed, and as quickly as she came, she was gone.

Jim sat back in his chair, turning back to the slim computer screen that still displayed the photo of the woman his men hunted. His eyes roamed over the details for the thousandth time.

She was a Black woman in her nineties who was the sole survivor of LV-318. Thanks to being in a cryogenic pod for seventy years, as the dropship floated in space, she hadn't aged a day. The latest photo they had obtained, one taken after she was found, showed that. It was still a mystery of how she even survived in the first place.

A lucky draw in life.

That's what the scientists and doctors had said.

It sounded like bullshit to him. None of the pieces added up. There was another detail that was missing. There had to be. A civilian surviving Xenomorphs was no lucky draw. The odds would've been stacked against her from the start.

He closed out the file and sighed, dragging his hand down his face. It was all too much.

Retirement couldn't come soon enough.

Once they found the woman, he would wait out the rest of his time with the company before finally taking his exit so he could relax on a beach in the Bahamas. He wanted to soak up the sun and let his worries wash away with the tide. At the moment he had too much on his plate and no way to alleviate the pressure.

The pressure was slowing suffocating him.

Finding the woman would fix a lot of problems. Only then would he truly be able to relax. Peace of mind would be there for a short time and he wouldn't have to rely on his old habit of drinking. His bad habit had definitely messed up things in his personal life, so he tried to limit when he drank.

It was a small effort.

"Where the fuck are you?" He swiped the Manila file and its contents off the desk and rubbed his eyes.

Space was vast, so who knew how far out she could be. The tracking systems built into ships were only effective within a certain distance of the human sphere — the area of where humanity had explored space so far. Hers hadn't pinged once since it had last shown up. There was no way of finding her unless she returned to the human sphere.

It was dangerous.

They could potentially come across Predators and that was the last thing they would need. With the bounty hunting party armed they would be easy prey, maybe even worthy if they fought hard enough.

This was just another amazing day working for this shit hole company where one thing happened after the other. A job where there was constantly bullshit. Bullshit after bullshit.

The bullshit never stopped.

It wouldn't stop when they finally found their little survivor, either. It would just continue and keep going.

A runaway train.

Jim rose to his feet and walked to the wide window that spanned the back wall of his office. Outside he could see nothing but dark forest, the moon too small to truly give light. The only thing he saw was the occasional guard that walked back and forth on their patrol around the perimeter of the building, the beams of their flashlights sweeping around. No one would dare approach or break in, but the company was forever paranoid.

Soon.

Soon they would find the woman and tie the loose ends of the former experiment. They would do something different.

Smiling to himself, he thought of the eventual progress they would make.

Sacrifices would be made but humanity would benefit in the long run.